We Are Mystified by Eric Holloway

[glipsnort (Steve Schaffner)]

@EricMH

To bring this back to DNA and evolution, some make the claim that evolution can originate the MI in DNA. In fact, that is its whole claim to fame, that natural selection and mutation are sufficient to create all the genetic diversity we see, as if there were some special MI creating ability in the evolutionary process itself. But, this we now know to be false due to the law of information non growth.

However, you haven’t shown that information non growth has any implications for the subset of MI in DNA. If your information theory argument is correct, than the mutual information in the entire system cannot increase. But the entire system – everything that causally interacts with the DNA – includes not just the DNA, but the rest of the organism, the rest of the ecosystem, the rest of the planet, the sun, and the volume of space that the sun radiates into. If you model that entire system as deterministic, I have no problem with the claim that the information in it does not increase. The mutual information between two copies of a genome, however, are a miniscule portion of the total information, and nothing you’ve presented here says anything about whether it can increase or not.